Doctoral Dissertation Research: Using language documentation and experimental methods to investigate differential case marking in Sumi, a Tibeto-Burman language

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Linguistics studies how the structure of human language helps people to communicate. When describing events, speakers may wish to simply convey "who did what to whom." A second goal in describing events is in how speakers may want to direct a listener's attention to information that is new or unexpected. In well-known languages, these two goals are associated with different sets of linguistic device, such as sentence structures ('syntax'), components of words ('morphology'), and aspects of the pronunciation of phrases and sentences ('prosody'). For example, English uses subject and object case forms of pronouns for the first goal, and prosody, or intonation, for the second. However, many other languages do not consistently mark subjects and/or objects. Furthermore, they often use a marker that identifies the doer of an action to also highlight a particular participant that is unexpected. This project will answer questions about how speakers of such languages communicate who is responsible for an action, and how they resolve potential ambiguity in meaning through other means such as intonation. This project will provide new insights into how humans use language for communication, and has broader implications for models of communication that better integrate different components of linguistic structure, such as syntax and morphology with prosody. The documentation will form the core material analyzed in a doctoral dissertation produced by the CoPI. Broader impacts include a publicly available deposit of the recordings, transcriptions, and rich metadata at the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC), based in Australia, and the uses of this material by members of the community, including local organizations dedicated to language development and cultural preservation.In this project, the CoPI, a doctoral student at the University of Oregon will be documenting and analyzing Sumi, a language of Northeast India from the Tibeto-Burman language family. Sumi has an interesting system known as differential argument marking where the subject of a transitive or intransitive sentence is not consistently marked for case, but depends also on other semantic factors, such as the animacy and definiteness of the subject, the tense of the sentence and whether the sentence is affirmative or negative. The study will use a combination of new quantitative corpus methods with traditional linguistic fieldwork methods, including the recording and analysis of naturalistic texts, to identify which of these factors are relevant. In addition, although linguistic research has tended to separate the study of morphology and syntax from that of intonation, experimental methods used in prosodic research will be used to demonstrate how prosodic analysis can be integrated into the study of morphosyntax, and what can be gained from a combination of both. The recorded video and audio data will also contribute to a larger grammatical description of the language, which is necessary for future language development. The project is also supported by members of the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati in Assam, as part of an ongoing and growing collaboration between the Linguistics Department at the University of Oregon and linguists and institutions in Northeast India.